Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers Margarita Vaysman Bowers, Katherine. Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2022. 264 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Works cited. Index. $65.00. In the last decade, studies of the Russian Gothic have become a healthy subfield, with new publications appearing every year. This growth is spurred on by the development of the field at large: interdisciplinary Gothic studies are booming globally, with three research centres in the UK alone (in Manchester, Sheffield and Stirling) and a specialized Gothic Studies journal, published by Edinburgh University Press. But it is also thanks to studies like Bowers's that this once marginal topic is now an important component of both academic discussions and curricula specifically in Russian studies. Writing Fear urges us to rethink our assumptions about an intriguing and understudied aspect of nineteenth-century Russian realist writing: its relationship with popular literary genres, especially the Gothic. While isolated cases, like Fedor Dostoevskii's interest in sensationalist newspaper reports or Aleksandr Pushkin's Gothic parodies, are well-known, no study so far has charted a sustained timeline of Russian realism's engagement with Gothic literature and art. In keeping with other excellent recent nineteenth-century Russian Gothic studies, like Valeria Sobol's Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Ithaca, NY, 2020), Bowers's monograph focuses on both canonical and less well-known texts. Sophisticated close readings of the usual Gothic suspects like Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol´, Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevskii and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are accompanied by chapters on the once prominent but now almost forgotten authors like Evgeniia Tur, Evgenii Grebenka and Boris Savinkov. This unusually wide span, as well as Bowers's impressive command of both recent global theories of the Gothic and primary Russian sources, makes Writing Fear invaluable for anyone reading, [End Page 157] or writing, about Russian realism. This book makes bold but convincing theoretical claims, while retaining an accessible tone that does not take its readers' knowledge of the subject for granted. Bowers's main argument does not only concern the presence of Gothic elements in Russian realist fiction, the scale of which has previously been underappreciated even in the landmark studies on the subject. Importantly, she also explains why the Gothic — as style, narrative mode and set of tropes — was so important for Russian realists: it allowed them to depict 'transgression, trauma, or injustice', 'engaging readers on the deeply affective level through building up fear' (p. 10). Bowers uses the term 'Gothic realism' ('moments when authors writing in what we recognise as a realist style turn to gothic narrative devices, using the genre as a tool to articulate a facet of lived experience through the affective engagement of the reader', p. 10), to discuss a range of literary phenomena. The introductory chapter, 'Russian Realism and the Gothic', charts the evolution of this term from its first use in Mikhail Bakhtin's unpublished dissertation to recent scholarly re-appraisals of Russian realism. Part one, 'Gothic Migrations', focuses on 'the way Russian writers began using Gothic elements outside of Gothic works' (p. 12). Chapter one, 'A Russian Reader's Gothic Library', provides a long-awaited update on the themes first explored by Vadim Vatsuro. Chapter two, 'Gothic Transmutations in Pushkin and Gogol´', focuses on the Gothic 'aesthetic, authenticity and parody' (p. 12) in Evgenii Onegin (1825–32) and Dead Souls (1842), two texts that were 'deeply influential in the development of Russian realist poetics' (p. 12). Chapter three, 'Russian Landscapes in a Gothic Frame', compares the 'Gothic narrative frames' (p. 13) of Ivan Goncharov's 'Oblomov's Dream' (1849) and Turgenev's 'Bezhin Lea' (1851). Chapter four, 'The Idiot: Dostoevskii's Gothic Novel', explores the effect of the Gothic on Dostoevskii's experiments with the novelistic form. Part Two, 'Gothic Realism', 'illuminate[s] the function of the gothic as a formal innovation within literary realism' (p. 13). Chapter five, 'Physiological Petersburg, Gothic Petersburg', focuses on Gothic urban landscapes, and the way writers like Nikolai Nekrasov used Gothic tropes in a didactic way. Chapter six, 'Gothic Subjectivity and the Woman's Question', compares the use of marginalized...

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